Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers of materials over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
The semiconductor industry has continued to improve upon the integration density of electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature sizes, which allow for more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that utilize less area and/or have lower heights than packages of the past, for some applications.
Three dimensional integrated circuits (3DICs) are a recent development in semiconductor packaging in which multiple semiconductor dies are stacked upon one another, such as package-on-package (PoP) and system-in-package (SiP) packaging techniques. By adopting the new packaging technologies, the integration levels of the packages may be increased. These relatively new types of packaging technologies for semiconductors face manufacturing challenges.